Bob Herbert's Slant

It has often been the case in America that specific religions, races and ethnic groups have been singled out for discrimination, demonization, incarceration and worse. But there have always been people willing to stand up boldly and courageously against such injustice. Their efforts are needed again ..

The cost of college has skyrocketed and a four-year degree has become an ever more essential cornerstone to a middle-class standard of living. But what are America’s kids actually learning in college? For an awful lot of students, the answer appears to be not much.

In Lewis Powell’s now-famous memo to America’s business community, which felt beleaguered in the political environment of 1971, the future Supreme Court justice stressed the importance of organizing. “Strength lies in organization,” he wrote, “in careful long-range planning and imp ..

Lynda Hiller teared up. “We’re struggling real bad,” she said, “and it’s getting harder every day.” A handful of people were sitting around a dining room table in a row house in North Philadelphia on Wednesday, talking about the problems facing working people in America. The setting out ..

Buried deep beneath the stories about executive bonuses, the stock market surge and the economy’s agonizingly slow road to recovery is the all-but-silent suffering of the many millions of Americans who, economically, are going down for the count. A 46-year-old teacher in Charlotte, Vt., wh ..

John Drew believes, quaintly, that we are our brother’s keeper. President Obama does not seem to believe this quite as strongly. And, of course, many of the Republicans in Congress do not believe it at all. Mr. Drew is the president of Boston’s antipoverty agency, called Action for Bo ..

Early in Eugene Jarecki’s documentary, “Reagan,” you hear the voice of Ronald Reagan saying, “Someday it might be worthwhile to find out how images are created — and even more worthwhile to learn how false images come into being.” Indeed. The image that many, perhaps most, Amer ..

As the throngs celebrated in Cairo, I couldn’t help wondering about what is happening to democracy here in the United States. I think it’s on the ropes. We’re in serious danger of becoming a democracy in name only. While millions of ordinary Americans are struggling with unemployment a ..

The Ronald Reagan crowd loved to talk about morning in America. For millions of individuals and families, perhaps the majority, it’s more like twilight — with nighttime coming on fast. Look out the window. More and more Americans are being left behind in an economy that is being divide ..

The data zealots have utterly discombobulated themselves. They were expecting something on the order of 150,000 new jobs to have been created in January. That would have been a lousy number, but they were fully prepared to spin it as being pretty good. They thought the official jobless rate ..

If there’s a better government program than Social Security, I’d like to know what it is. It has gone a long way toward eliminating poverty among the elderly. Great numbers of them used to live and die in ghastly, Dickensian conditions of extreme want. Without Social Security today, near ..

On April 22, 2008, almost exactly one year after 32 students and faculty members were slain in the massacre at Virginia Tech, the dealer who had sold one of the weapons used by the gunman delivered a public lecture on the school’s campus. His point: that people at Virginia Tech should be allowed t ..

The second semester French class began a little after 9 on the morning of April 16, 2007. The weather that day was unusually cold for April. A light snow was falling. One of the students, Colin Goddard, now 25, recalled what happened that morning in a new documentary film, “Living for 32.� ..

Consider the extremes. President Obama is redesigning his administration to make it even friendlier toward big business and the megabanks, which is to say the rich, who flourish no matter what is going on with the economy in this country. (They flourish even when they’re hard at work destroying th ..

You just can’t close the door on this crowd. The party that brought us the worst economy since the Great Depression, that led us into Iraq and the worst foreign policy disaster in American history, that would like to take a hammer to Social Security and a chisel to Medicare, is back in control of ..